bug#28222: [PATCH] Use thin font smoothing in macOS

[Ben Bonfil]

Hi Alan,

Thanks for taking the time to look at this.

The way I see it, this is analogous to the existing ns-antialias-text flag, which is another rendering preference that can be changed system-wide, yet is available within Emacs.

I would say that the use of these options is sometimes beneficial, based on one's choice of fonts.
For example, if you use a bitmap font in Emacs, you would likely disable anti-aliasing, but you wouldn't necessarily do it system-wide.

(I don't really know how to turn on thin smoothing system-wide, but that's not the main argument)

As for Dr. Stallman's question: fortunately this is not necessary in GNU/Linux, but on macOS with a non-HiDPI display I personally find the difference significant.

Ben

On Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 6:13 PM, Alan Third <alan@idiocy.org> wrote:

On Thu, Aug 24, 2017 at 01:20:26PM +0200, Ben Bonfil wrote:
> Attached is a small patch that enables thin font smoothing on macOS, just
> like in iTerm2.
> It is toggled by a new variable called ns-use-thin-smoothing.
>
> Tested only on macOS Sierra (10.12.6)

Hi, is there any reason this needs to be done within Emacs? As far as
I can tell you should be able to set thin anti‐aliasing without
needing a setting in Emacs.
--
Alan Third